Free One Summer by Karen Robards

body. A mangy cur like all the other mangy curs, a little bigger than most. Underfed, bred for meanness, probably dangerous.
    They’d always had a dog like that. Big and ugly and full of hate, and no wonder. Willie would kick it and tease itand chain it and starve it to make it mean. As mean as the old man himself.
    Only this dog wasn’t chained.
    The growl deepened, intensified. The animal’s head lowered menacingly. Johnny felt his muscles tense in anticipation of an attack. Glancing around, he sought for something, a chunk of wood or anything, with which to smash the creature when it leaped.
    But it didn’t leap. Instead, after another rumbling growl, its head came up, and it seemed to sniff the air. A chicken fluttered and squawked off to the right, but the animal never so much as twitched an ear in the direction of the distraction. Instead it seemed to be staring intently at Johnny.
    Struck by its attitude, almost as curious now as he was afraid, Johnny stared back. As his eyes traveled over the tawny pelt, absorbing such details as the shape of the head and ears and the thickness and length of the tail, an incredible possibility occurred to him.
    The dog whined softly.
    “Wolf?” It couldn’t be. The dog had been four years old when he’d been arrested. That would make him—fifteen now. An incredibly advanced age for a mongrel for whom mistreatment had been the norm.
    “Wolf, is that you?” He’d loved the damned dog, as stupid as that sounded. The pup had been one of a litter borne by a stray who’d taken up residence in the rotting, abandoned barn that had stood in a nearby field. With his brothers and friends, Johnny had thrown rocks at the bitch and her whelps, but at night he’d sneaked back over with pans full of food scraps. The bitch had never lost her wariness of him, but the pups had, particularly the largest one, who took to him like a duckling to its mother. One day, when the pups were about seven weeks old, he found the mother lying dead out by the road. Not knowing what else to do with them, he fetched the pups home. He should have known better. His father had promptly tossed four ofthe five squirming, licking little creatures into the back of his truck and driven them off to dump them God knew where. The fifth, Wolf, had been allowed to stay because of his size and because Willie thought that he had the makings of a good watchdog. Despite Johnny’s protests, Willie had immediately chained Wolf and set about making him mean. Though Johnny had tried to protect the dog, his father had succeeded with him, to the extent that Johnny was about the only person in the world the animal had ever had any use for.
    Sometimes, in prison, when he’d been lying awake at night staring at the bunk over his head, Johnny had thought that he missed Wolf most of all.
    Wasn’t that a damned sad commentary on his life?
    The dog whined again. Knowing he was being ridiculous, that he was liable to lose the hand at the wrist when the animal charged, Johnny nonetheless took a step forward, holding out his fingers for sniffing.
    “Wolf? Come here, boy.”
    Incredibly, the huge animal sank to its belly and slunk forward, behaving as if it wanted to believe but feared a cruel trick. Johnny dropped to his knees to greet it, his hands reaching out, burrowing in the coarse hide, stroking and scratching as the dog whined and licked and pawed him and butted him with its head.
    “Ah, Wolf,” he said as he accepted the truth at last, that this one thing that he had loved had been spared in order to greet him. Then, as the big head snuggled into his lap, he wrapped his arms around the dog’s thick neck and buried his face against the animal’s side.
    For the first time in eleven years, he wept.

8

    “R achel, we got a problem.”
    So what else was new? Rachel thought wearily as she shifted the kitchen phone to her other ear. In the forty-eight hours that had passed since Johnny Harris’s return to Tylerville, her life